[Bf-committers] Adding support for tetrahedron and hexahedron elements

[George Robert Anderson]

I'd agree with that assessment. I've never encountered much, if any, need
for manually editing an FE mesh, and Blender users are even less likely to
need that. I would encourage Iman to try implementing an importer and
exporter as a Python plugin. I think you can do everything short of
point-and-click extrusion with some relatively simple scripts (maybe a few
100 lines). Remember that with Python you have access to the low-level mesh
operations via bmesh. Once you scope it out there and demonstrate the use
cases, you'll have a better shot at getting support from the developers.

George

четверг, 7 ноября 2013 г. пользователь Brecht Van Lommel писал:

> I'm not so convinced about adding editing support for such a data
> structure to Blender now. I can see the point of simulation tools
> generating or storing such volumetric elements, but going all the way
> to edit mode and BMesh seems like it would add a ton complexity to the
> mesh system, for uses cases that Blender is not focused on (CAD).
>
> A Volume primitive in addition to a Mesh does makes sense to be, but
> something based on regular grids is more standard for Animation and
> VFX. Tetrahedral meshes might be used in some simulations there, but a
> manual editing system for them I haven't heard of, they tend to be
> automatically generated from a surface mesh. Manually editing and
> doing topological operations like BMesh seems too specialized for
> Blender to support.
>
> Brecht.
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:51 PM, Iman Brasseur <iman.brasseur at gmail.com<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > I'm looking into adding support for volumetric elements in Blender. The
> > idea is to be able to create and export meshes for finite elements that
> > contain tetrahedral and hexahedral elements. To create such meshes one
> > could start for example with a single tetrahedron. Then when selecting a
> > triangular face, instead of extruding the triangle as a wedge-shaped new
> > surface, it would create a new tetrahedral element that shares 3 vertices
> > with the original tetrahedron.
> >
> > Going through the source code, I thought I should start with
> bmesh_class.h
> > and add (next to the BMVert, BMEdge, BMFace) a new element type BMVol to
> > add the new volumetric element there. Does that seem like the right way
> to
> > start? Any quick hints to pieces of code I should look at would be
> greatly
> > appreciated!
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Iman
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